Surfcheck FAQ

This site has now been up long enough, and been found by enough people
to merit a compilation of Frequently Ask Questions. Here are some of the
questions and comments that I receive often via email:

Why is the data for _____ missing?

This site is merely a collector of weather and wave data from other locations
on the Internet. Any of these source sites may be experiencing their own
problems or be otherwise unreachable at the time a set of data is collected.
If the information you are looking for is missing then either check back
later or try referencing it directly on the source site by clicking on the
blue arrow by that item.

Can you add _____ to the page?

If you have improvements or additions to suggest, feel free to send them
to kurtwindisch@yahoo.com .
However, one of my design goals with this site is to keep it compact, more-or-less
viewable in one unscrolled browser window. Therefore, I don't add every
new piece of data that I find.

I'm visiting/moving to Oregon...Where should I surf?

There are a number of other sites that provide guides to surf spots in Oregon.
Try the OregonSurf.com for
starters. Also keep in mind that much of the Oregon coast is essentially
wilderness. There are many great surf spots off the beaten track (many known,
many yet to be discovered), and part of the joy of surfing in Oregon is
road tripping down the coast open to whatever you find.

How did you create this page?

This site is updated automatically once per hour by a UNIX cron job executing
a Perl script on a FreeBSD-based server. The script downloads the data from
its various sources throughout the Internet, parses out the specific items
presented here, and formats them into the HTML code that your browser sees.
Ordinarily, the site requires absolutely no intervention by myself for it
to function properly. I only need to do maintenence when new features are
added or data formats or URLs of the data sources change. Of course, since
the data is fetched from external sites, failures to connect to those sites
and retrieve a valid data file may cause intermitent missing data on my
site.

If you wish to know more about how this is done, you can view the current
surfcheck perl script: surfcheck.pl. Keep in
mind that nobody pays me to do this, so this code is not the most beautiful
I've ever created. I used http_get to download data into the Perl script,
but other methods could work as good or better (BSD fetch, LibWWW-Perl
library operations).